Producing music is an incredibly creative process, and knowing the tools of the trade is essential in order to transmit the musical ideas in your head into the DAW in a creative and uninhibited way. Whether you have used a computer to create music before, or you have been curious about production for years, this 4-week course will give you an introductory look into the world of Avid Pro Tools and Pro Tools First.

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This is a very useful course and Chrissy is a fantastic instructor. Would love to take another course with her - she makes everything easy to understand.

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Aug 23, 2016

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Great course with a fantastic teacher who kept every lesson easy to understand and interesting. Thank you for this course, it was really useful!

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Exploring MIDI and Software Instruments

In this lesson, we'll focus on MIDI and software instruments. We'll start by learning about the different kinds of sound waves. Next, we'll learn the difference between samplers and synthesizers and how to use them in music production. We'll also learn how to manipulate and automate MIDI.

Enseigné par

Chrissy Tignor-Fisher

Assistant Professor

Transcription

[MUSIC] Now let's check out expand, which is a sampler. And the main difference between a sampler and a synthesizer, like we mentioned, is that synthesizers create their own sound and samplers play back prerecorded sounds. So expand is an example of a sampler. And we tend to use samplers for more realistic sounds that replicate more acoustic instruments. Open up expand in a software instrument track and you're going to recognize this from a previous lesson. So now that you know a little bit about synthesis, opening expand, you're going to see some of these terms already. For example You can now see that there's an attack, a release, and a cutoff option with expand. So like I said a lot of these parameters. You're going to see them again and again depending on the synthesizer or sampler that you've used. So go through and find a patch that you like. So you can choose to have a synthesized sound like we mentioned, like a pad. Or we can use any sort of realistic sound. I chose a clavenet. So unlike vacuum we can actually play chords with expand. So we don't have to worry about just playing one note at a time. [MUSIC] Let's experience with the tac and release like we did with vacuum. So, this clavinet sound, [SOUND], has a fast attack and a fast release naturally. Which means it comes in right away when I press it, and it goes away immediately after I let go. But if I make my attack longer you can hear how the sample changes. [SOUND] So we can actually apply the exact same formula for expand as a sampler as we did with vacuum as a synth. We can also change the release and totally change the overall sound of this clavinet. [SOUND] And you can see that it lasts longer after I let go of the key. So let's try the cutoff. And you'll hear right now it has more high frequencies. [SOUND] And if we bring the cutoff down it's going to get a little bit duller. [SOUND] So you can use some of the same techniques as we use with Vacuum and expand. So one of the cool things about expand is we can actually layer different sounds on top of each other. So we can create more lush sounds than we could with vacuum. So for example, if I wanted this clavinet to be layered with a synth pad, I could actually play that sound together on the keyboard and combine the sounds as one. So, in order to do that, you'll actually go to the second section, below the preset that you chose. And you choose something different. So I'm going to choose a bright and pads to layer with my clarinet. And when I do that, and play it together, you're going to hear both the clarinet sound, and the synth pad. [SOUND]. Just so you can hear a little bit more of a combination of the two, I'm going to turn down the synth pad and then turn it back up again. So you can actually play with the mix of these two sounds. [SOUND] And you can layer this up to four times. And I don't have to make anymore software instrument tracks or copy any MIDI data or anything like that. So the easy controls on expand are going to control everything together. So no matter if you have one sound or four sounds. You can control the attack and the release and the cutoff on all of them. But if you want to effect each individual sound by itself, you can see above where it says easy that is has different slots for each instrument. And these are going to contain different parameters for each sound that you can change individually. So, if you want to change the cut-off of your synth pad, but you don't want to change the cut-off of your clavinet you can do that just by selecting the effects for that particular patch. And you can tell which one it is just by the letter that's associated with the sound you chose. There's also a reverb and a choruser built into expand that you can also utilize to create these sounds that you like. Just remember to turn them on at the bottom. And you can control each one by controlling the effects knobs on each one of the sampler sounds. So for example, if I wants lots of this hall reverb, which is going to be a recreation of a space on my clavinet sound I just turn up the knob for effects number one. [SOUND] And if I turn down the synth pad just so you can hear what this has done in terms of the sound. [SOUND] It goes from having a lot of space to a little bit of space by turning the reverb back down. And you can do the same thing with the. So now, play in a chord progression using expand and you can layer something with vacuum on it as well. And we can move on to the next lesson where we'll talk about affecting the midi even further. [MUSIC]